


All My Bones

by LittleRedCosette



Series: Resplendence [5]
Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: Angst, Character Death, F/M, First Meetings, Grief/Mourning, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, Love, M/M, Non-Linear Narrative, Post-Inception
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-25
Updated: 2017-06-25
Packaged: 2018-11-18 20:30:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,273
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11298279
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LittleRedCosette/pseuds/LittleRedCosette
Summary: Kaunas, Lithuania. It’s Thursday morning in November. There’s a thunderstorm outside.Arthur isn’t going to cry, not even when the stench of gasoline stings his eyes.





	All My Bones

**Author's Note:**

> This might make sense if you haven't read the other stories in the series, but it also might not.

.

.

Arthur piles the bodies into the middle of the room.

Waits for the numb with laboured breaths.

Douses eight of them in two gallons of gasoline, piled into an ugly twister match. Spreads two more gallons around the warehouse floor.

They burn fast. The smell intolerably toxic, grey smoke heavy and thick.

The ninth body is the heaviest, weighed down by eight years of treacherous roads and thorny secrets that are Arthur’s to carry alone, now.

Eames is as uncooperative in death as he was in life. Limbs splayed, catching on broken glass and smearing viscous blood across the floor in streaks of black-red-brown.

Arthur closes his eyes to roll him into the flames, because sentimentality hurts like a blade, keeps like a curse.

The flames consume Eames no different from the men that killed him. Blond hair, tan skin. Roped muscles charring into wood.

Arthur tucks his gun into the back of his trousers. Turns on his heel and walks out into the rain.

.

.

( _Rugged and dark, winding among the springs of fire and poison, inaccessible to avarice or pride._ )

.

.

Their hotel room is the same as when they left together. Eames’ suitcase open at the foot of the bed, Arthur’s neatly zipped under the window. He’s quick about it. Pulls all the passports and money and weapons secreted about the room into one small rucksack.

Tugs Eames’ pilot jacket over his bloody suit.

It takes less than five minutes to wipe down the room of fingerprints, another two before he’s leaving out of a service exit.

Tucks himself in a taxi, pulls out seven hundred Litas and hands it over.

' _Vairuoti_ ,' he says.

There’s blood on the money he puts in the driver’s palm.

The man’s brow furrows, takes in the ash grey of his passenger’s face, the red rims of his eyes.

Nods slow, puts both hands on the wheel. Drives fast and far and quiet.

.

.

In the hotel, before, in the quiet hours; in the calm that broke in waves, Eames complains about carpet burn on his right knee, possible cramp in his jaw.

'Where _is_ the romance, these days?' Arthur grumbles into the water of the shower while Eames shaves with a blunt, two blade razor.

'It left to make room for my arthritis,' Eames mutters through his clenched teeth. 'I am older than you, you know.'

'Uh huh,' Arthur snorts. 'I’m your regular toy boy.'

The water pressure is almost nonexistent, but it’s hot to the point of scalding and the soap isn’t too flowery. There’s a bruise over his right shoulder that’s three weeks old and won’t go away. He stretches up to press it hard, tongues his back teeth in case the one that still aches is loose.

(It isn’t.)

'Oh for the love of God!'

Eames’ voice, a yelp of desperation.

'Seriously, give up before you slice open your own carotid,' Arthur says with a sigh of exasperation.

'I will not be defeated,' Eames replies hotly.

Spits and hisses his fury.

Clambers into the shower, muscling his way under the hot spray with groping hands and strong shoulders.

Gets blood on Arthur’s clean neck as he nips his way up to his jaw line.

It washes off easily.

.

.

 _Eames, you sent me away_ , Arthur said, once.

 _Yes_ , Eames replied, cold and damp and sickly. _And you left_.

.

.

Arthur’s straightening his tie for the third time when Eames puts his hands on both shoulders. Bodily turns him.

Sometimes Eames appears taller than he actually is.

(This is not one of those times.)

His hands slide from Arthur’s shoulders up his throat, until his palms are cupping his jaw, fingers in the threads of his hair. He traces the pads of his thumbs over the soft skin of his lower eyelids.

He runs hot, this man that Arthur has carried in secrets and lies among shadows. Arthur’s cheeks are warm, and Eames’ kisses him in a surge, lips open, tongue wet.

Arthur swallows his air, and he looks at Eames’ closed eyes.

There’s a frown in his brow, and Arthur presses a thumb to it, smoothes at all the creases of age that have weathered his face.

He tucks his nose against Eames’ cheek, less scruff than before his fight with the razor, smelling of toothpaste and cologne.

'Eames?' Arthur says.

And Eames looks up at him through bronze eyelashes, lips twisting a wry smile.

'Yes?' he asks.

'I’m sorry,' Arthur says, and the frown curls into his forehead again.

'For what?'

(Sounds suspicious, which he is, because Arthur didn’t even apologise for stealing Eames’ cut of the Venice Job back in 2007.)

'You didn’t want me here,' he says, and sounds embarrassingly petulant.

Eames’ smile curls briefly into a smirk, tilts his head in a question and sinks his fingers deeper into Arthur’s pomade.

'On this job,' Arthur clarifies.

Pulls back out from Eames’ reach to smooth his hair over. Eames’ laugh is a whisper and a lie.

'I want you everywhere, darling,' he replies, stepping back into Arthur’s space, stepping until Arthur’s crowded into the hotel door and their crotches are pressed together and he can taste his cologne.

'I just –' Arthur insists with an impotent struggle out of Eames’ arms.

'What?' Eames presses, arms tight around Arthur’s waist. 'You just what, darling?'

One hand curls around the back of Arthur’s thigh, the other at his throat, fingers tucking beneath the collar.

'Stop that,' Arthur wriggles, fingers on Eames’ lips, the heel of his hand on his sternum 'No. Eames, we have to go.' Eames kisses him, and Arthur bites his lower lip hard, only succeeding in pulling a groan from Eames. 'We’ll be late.'

He says it firm, like Eames has ever cared about tardiness, only this is the final run before the _actual job_ , and he should, he really _should_ care. Is only proving Arthur’s point the longer he stalls.

'Tell me,' Eames says through his sly grin. 'Go on, tell me.'

There’s worry in Eames’ eyes. It’s green among the grey and his smile is disappearing.

' _Arthur_ ,' he says, sounding extra English.

A command inside a tone of curiosity that makes Arthur think of late night stake outs and coffee with too much creamer.

And then the words sear up out of Arthur like another kiss. They taste of butter and sandalwood and they are significantly less painful than he imagined them to be.

'I love you,' he says, and Eames doesn’t smile, doesn’t frown, doesn’t laugh.

He takes half a step back. Eyes soft and mouth slack, and there’s a cut near his lip from the razor.

'Don’t look at me like that,' Arthur mutters.

He might be blushing, or his skin might have caught fire. He isn’t sure.

All he knows is that he loves this man, and Eames is looking at him like he’s never admitted it out loud before now.

'Come on, darling,' Eames says, as if it’s an everyday confession, despite the wonder in his eyes.

(The truth is, Arthur’s never admitted it out loud before now, not really, not when Eames can hear him. Not once.)

Eames just reaches past Arthur, wrist brushing his hip to turn the door handle, ghosts a kiss along his jaw.

'We’ll be late,' Eames says, like he cares about tardiness.

.

.

It’s Thursday morning. The sky carries a lot of stars, and even more clouds.

Arthur has no idea what is to come.

(But Eames might.)

.

.

_(Empathy. Empathy run riot. Empathy with the victim, with the beaten. Are you sick yet?)_

.

.

Sixty-two minutes later, Eames’ blood will be all over Arthur’s hands and clothes and there’ll even be some on his face. It will dry to scabs in the back of a taxi as it races out of Kaunas via unpoliced back roads.

It won’t wash off so easily that time.

He won’t cry yet, though.

.

.

That comes later.

.

.

Arthur, it’s me. Please. I came as soon as I could.

_H-How did you find me?_

.

.

The Marrakesh apartment seems fitting, because the Marrakesh apartment was bought by the death of a twenty-one year old woman who was in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong man.

Arthur had had some qualms about stealing the lease of an apartment owned by a woman whose throat was slit simply because they weren’t fast enough to condemn the man that did it.

Eames had not shared these qualms, but then again, Eames was a crook long before he was introduced to a PASIV.

So when Morocco calls to Arthur like a siren in the silence of Eames’ absence, Arthur goes.

Even though the punishing sunshine has never agreed with his skin, and Arabic has never stuck to his tongue, he answers the call through the fog of his silent, burning rage.

The apartment is small and it has yellow peeling walls. The key is in a piggy bank in a studio flat in Manchester, so he breaks in with soft clicks.

He stares about the apartment, at the peeling walls and the dusty shelves. He trails a hand over the books, heavy fingered, so that they are pulled from their places onto the floor for him to kick and crease as he walks to the bedroom. He stares at the bed that hasn’t been slept in for over a year, and even then it was a stopover between back to back jobs.

He’s wearing a Star Wars t-shirt and linen trousers, courtesy of the suitcase he picked up from an airport baggage rack in Madrid, and over it a pilot jacket that’s too heavy even in November, but Arthur can’t take it off, yet.

He stares at the bed, a mattress with silk sheets and a handful of blankets and pillows that won’t smell of anyone by now because they’ll be full of sand-scented dust.

The curtains are thin red and the walls are angry yellow and the floor creaks when Arthur falls to his knees before the bed like a sanctuary that won’t grant him entry.

The screaming comes, then.

(It tears through his throat like lit gasoline.)

.

.

Arthur calls Saito.

It isn’t a conscious decision, per say.

Marrakesh is not a quiet city, but here in this shabby apartment the silence that swallows his screams until they grow raspy is astounding. Like the dark of night it creeps in through the windows and when Arthur pulls out his phone it feels hot and sticky, smeared with blood, but that’s impossible because _that_ phone burnt to a crisp in a warehouse in Lithuania.

Still, Arthur wipes the imaginary blood away and thinks _help me_ , and the next thing he knows there’s a brisk voice jabbering Japanese in his ear.

'Saito,' he says, dry and dead, like the desert that surrounds this silence-swallowing, vivid city.

'Saito,' he says.

He repeats it and repeats it until,

'Yes?' a man’s voice asks in that sharp, demanding drawl.

'Saito,' Arthur says again, putrid relief.

He suddenly realises he is still on the floor of the bedroom.

He pulls his legs in, so that he’s kneeling, elbows tucked into his sides and his forehead pressing on the gritty floor. His breath is loud in his own ears, now, hot in his own face.

'Arthur,' Saito says, and then, 'What has happened?'

Arthur hasn’t called Saito since a week after they parted ways in LAX.

They met briefly in March earlier this year, but it was fleeting and though the invitation for the job was left purposefully vague, it was obvious Saito was there for Eames, so Arthur had left quickly and politely. He’d taken a job in Mumbai while Eames flew to Seoul.

Now, Arthur scrambles for words and they fall out far too easily.

'Someone might be after me. My team.' Falter. Resolve. 'We were ambushed. We’d only been under a few minutes. All dead. The extractor. The architect. And the forger.'

Something very important vanishes inside Arthur’s chest.

A lung, or perhaps his breastbone. Some vital part is missing and one loud, angry sob rips through him before he takes hold of the oxygen in his throat and keeps it safe there, mouth closed.

'Where?' Saito asks after a pause, and Arthur’s gratitude is profound.

'Kaunas, Lithuania.'

'And now?'

It takes three breaths to make sure he isn’t going to embarrass himself with another outburst.

'Marrakesh,' he says. The vowels fade and it’s a wonder Saito understands, but luckily he does.

'Stay where you are,' Saito says. 'It will be taken care of.'

Saito ends the call, and Arthur’s first instinct is utter shame, because Saito is a business partner.

Not even that, he’s an _employer_ , and Arthur didn’t just call for help, didn’t just run to the nice man with the long arm and the fat bank accountant.

He cried to him like a kid calling his daddy, and that probably makes Arthur a little bitch, which is humiliating and hateful and Arthur is so angry at himself for calling, at Saito for answering.

(He’s angry at Eames for dying.)

.

.

(No, that’s not right.)

.

.

(He’s angry at Eames for dying on his watch.)

.

.

On the other side of the world, a woman called Sumiko knocks on her boss’ office door.

Sumiko, who wears colourful blouses and rarely smiles, and is the only secretary to last longer than six months in the Tokyo branch, opens the door when no answer comes.

Sitting behind his desk, Mr Saito slams down the phone and places his hands over his face, shielding his eyes from view.

'What can I do?' Sumiko asks.

Mr Saito pulls his head away from his palms, and it looks to take all his strength. The surety of his expression, though not gone entirely, is a little more transparent than usual.

'The English Thief is dead,' he says.

Sumiko tilts her head.

There’s a brief falling of thoughts, like leaves that drop too quickly for autumn to change them.

Quick eyes and casual words and a fox’s smile, _like a kitsune in reverse_ , she had murmured at him, and he had looked pleased.

'I liked him,' Sumiko says.

'So did I,' Mr Saito replies.

Then he picks up his phone, and the surety returns.

'I need you to send Shiori to Europe,' he says, and Sumiko nods, closing the door behind herself.

.

.

There is a moment when Arthur has a choice.

He stands in the streets of Marrakesh, stares at a man that will supply him with bottles of liquor and small bags of forgetful bliss.

On the other side of the street, market stalls glowing bright with fruit and vegetables and nuts and spices.

Last time, the stopover, one from Cape Town to Buenos Aires, the other Cadiz to Kuala Lumpur. They cooked in the apartment until they were sweating paprika.

Arthur is torn by this choice, and when he chooses he knows this isn’t a choice for today, or this week, or this month.

This is a choice that will define his future, the most toxic of ideas.

The next day, he wakes up clutching an empty Jameson’s bottle he doesn’t remember drinking.

All the plates in the kitchen are smashed. He cuts his foot on a shard of cheap porcelain as he hurries to empty his stomach in the sink.

Cobb arrives a week later.

.

.

When he does, Arthur has almost forgotten why he’s there at all.

.

.

( _Goodness, or cowardice?_ )

.

.

Arthur follows Eames into a pub, and is confronted by a wily grin.

'Can I help you darling?' he asks, with a mouth that Arthur actively avoids looking at for reasons he’s not entirely comfortable acknowledging, even to himself.

'It seems you’re a public menace, Mr Eames,' Arthur says, taking a seat at the bar and accepting the glass of amber liquid the man nudges at him.

The man’s smile deepens into a smirk as he toys with one of the four wallets he stole on his way to the pub, Arthur eleven steps behind him all the way.

'Arthur,' he says, and Arthur’s teeth clack together. Eames’ hair is crumpled, and there’s a yellowing bruise beneath one eye. His shirt is too big, making his sloping lines seem even thinner than they are. 'Don’t be angry, darling.'

The word jars like a curse.

He looks like an alley cat, and he smells like cigarettes. He has the look of a man who’s still getting used to eating more than one meal a day.

'I need a forger,' Arthur says. He sips his drink without hesitating.

Eames looks mildly impressed, as if he expected Arthur to order himself a fresh one.

'Your reputation precedes you, Mr Eames,' he adds. 'If you wanted to drug me, you would find a way.'

'I don’t think that’s a compliment,' Eames replies, sipping his own whisky.

'I’ve been told you’re very good.'

'At drugging people?'

'At forging,' Arthur says with a tiresome sigh.

Eames shrugs, shifting on his barstool.

'Apparently.'

He might be full of shit, or he might genuinely have no idea how valuable a commodity he is, should the rumours flying around his name prove true.

'George Maguire highly recommended you.'

Arthur doesn’t mean to accuse him, but an accusation is what comes out.

Eames chuffs a laugh.

'Georgie’s an old friend,' he says dismissively.

Arthur sits on the barstool next to this infuriating Englishman who honestly looks more interested in the bartender’s ass than what Arthur is saying.

George Maguire, Arthur recalls, once described Mallorie Cobb as _quite clever_ and _rather pretty_.

For a man so reticent with his praise, his description of the forger had been all but glowing.

'I have a Francis Bacon in a storage unit down the road, if you like,' Eames continues nonchalantly. His grey eyes flick up and down Arthur’s suit. 'You look the type.'

'I don’t think that’s a compliment,' Arthur replies, fingers tight on his glass.

Eames smiles indulgently.

The bartender flits past, almost stops, but something pushes her along. Her ponytail sways and this time Eames’ eyes don’t trail after her.

'Do you want the job?' Arthur asks.

'Not going to audition me first?'

'Yes,' Arthur says, impatient. 'But I want to know if you’re interested, first.'

Eames drains his glass and nods, wiping his mouth with his thumb.

'Very good,' he mutters. 'Well, no time like the present.'

.

.

(He gets the job.)

.

.

(And the next one, and the one after that.)

.

.

'Protect yourself,' Mallorie says with a knowing look in her effortless stare.

They’re on their second bottle of pinot grigio. She toys with her glass and Arthur refills his own.

'I mean it, Arthur,' she says, harder this time.

'I thought you were the romantic one,' Arthur reminds her with a smile, and when she doesn’t return it he blushes. She baffles him, this siren of wonder.

She’s sensual and she’s wise and she's flippant and she loves more fiercely than anyone Arthur has ever met.

'I know how to protect myself,' she says, and takes a sip of her wine.

They sit on the floor of the hotel balcony. Dom is still at the warehouse, working on the model.

'And I don’t?' Arthur returns, sharp and affronted.

Mal’s smile is everything, _says_ everything.

'You have a lot of walls,' she replies, like that isn’t the same thing.

(It isn’t the same thing.)

'He’s loved before,' she says like she knows his type.

'So have I,' Arthur says, hotter this time. A gulp of wine and he pushes up to lean against the rails of the balcony where Mal’s legs are hanging over the edge.

'Just protect yourself,' Mallorie says again.

.

.

He didn’t understand at the time. He didn’t understand because she’d danced with the smooth talking Englishman like a lover and jabbered French at him like a friend and shared a tub of ice cream with him like a sister.

He didn’t understand until he was sitting on the floor and that smooth talking Englishman, his smooth talking Englishman, was looking up at him with blood in his mouth and an apology in his gasps.

The walls weren’t enough.

They protected him from the lies, from the arguments, from the deceit.

They didn’t protect him from the love, though.

.

.

'Let’s get on with it, chaps,' Eames says, clapping his hands together.

'Quite,' the extractor replies.

The warehouse is ringing with the rain outside. There are deckchairs spread out around a centrepoint. The PASIV sits innocuous, open, waiting.

The architect is a tall man called Lint who specialises in European cities.

'Eames,' he says, nasal and nervous. 'The south tunnel –'

'Will be blocked until the train departs, I remember,' Eames smiles indulgently and Arthur feels his smile inside his mouth.

There’s history between them that Arthur doesn’t know, doesn’t need to know. It’s all there in the hunching of Eames’ shoulders and the way his pinky fingers curl as he takes his IV line.

'Timer set to twelve minutes,' Arthur says.

'Ready,' the extractor, Percy, says with a nod.

They sit in their chairs. Lint’s hand hovers over the button, and Arthur glances at Eames.

He’s looking up at the ceiling, frowning like this isn’t the easiest job they’ve had in over a year.

The needle nips, and the PASIV bites as it takes them under.

Arthur opens his eyes in a dusty Florence street. The projections surround him, a loud blend of Italian and American catching in the wind. There’s so many of them, they bustle and chase like a river and Arthur feels his hackles rise.

Something is wrong. He turns, catches a man standing in the road, staring directly at him. He’s smiling, cat-pleased and dog-ready.

The sun is beaming and beating, the city is sweating, and he can still hear the rain from outside the warehouse up above.

Arthur runs. His suit is constricting and his shoulders batter against the crowds and he yells, yells like a bear in a trap.

'Eames!'

The dream is too bright and the dream is heavier than life, heavier than the rain outside and heavier than the bricks of a building as it collapses and heavier than Eames’ body sinking over his own in a bed that dips around them.

'Percy!' he bellows and he reaches for his gun but it’s so heavy in his hand, grease and oil, and he’s pushing against the tide of projections as they grow in number, and the street is too long, too wide, too everything.

He can’t breathe, he won’t breathe, he isn’t –

A pain shrill and sharp in the crook of his elbow, and his body falls into the abyss but it isn’t an abyss, it’s the battering of gunfire, he falls into it like smoke and the sea and he hits the ground hard. Concrete, the warehouse floor, his shoulder a burst of pain and he’s been tipped out of his chair and he doesn’t know why.

But Lint is screaming and there’s a gun in his hand and there’s half a second between looking at a man wearing leather and cotton before there’s a hole in the man's head as he crumples.

'Lint?' Arthur cries, struggles to his feet, gun firing jolts into his shoulder, aching sharp, and he kicks Eames’ chair but it’s already tipped, he’s staggering to his feet and there’s a gun in his hand, too.

Percy lies in his chair, soaked in blood, asleep, dead.

The architect is on the floor, wrestling a gun out of another man’s hand and Eames is firing his gun with both hands and Arthur shoots at men swimming before his eyes as they tear up with dry panic.

A man, hands, a  gun, a knife. Arthur takes it like it’s his own, swift and clean and ugly and a hand grabs him, he can’t see Eames, but he can hear him, and he hears a shot and he hears Lint bellow in pain and bile rockets through Arthur into his mouth.

The man takes hold of Arthur but there’s a gun in Arthur’s right hand and a knife in his left and he swings hard with a glance and it slices through his throat like butter and ice. He sees his face, knows it and it hurts like a glancing blow to the head.

Gilbraith, the chemist, their chemist. The one that left two days ago. That should have left two days ago.

Gilbraith’s body slumps to the ground and Arthur looks at Lint, sprawled.

Eames’s chest is heaving and he looks furious, and Arthur doesn’t think it’s strange that he’s only angry, not surprised.

(He’ll think about it later, later in the screaming silence.)

'All clear,' Arthur says and Eames nods. There are bodies on the floor and there’s hydrogen in Arthur’s lungs. 'Time to go, now.'

He makes it one step towards the battered, broken PASIV lying in the middle of wreckage when the movement catches his eye, a black shape in the doorway, darting forwards.

Eames swings first, turns bodily, gun fires once but the spray of the automatic isn’t manual and Eames’ breath falls out of him. Arthur fires twice and the man crumples.

So does Eames.

.

.

 _Are you coming back_?

Yes.

 _I don’t believe you_.

Then don’t.

.

.

Arthur piles the bodies into the middle of the room.

He thinks about the inconvenient weight of them, instead of their faces.

He thinks about the Francis Bacon forgery in his bedroom in Paris. _Figure With Meat_ , the cloven joints of flesh and the man’s smudged face.

The stench of the gasoline stings his eyes.

.

.

 _I don’t believe you_ , Eames had said.

 _Then don’t_ , Arthur had replied, but what he’d meant was,

 _I wish you would_.

.

.

**Author's Note:**

> Title taken from: If you died, it would be as if all my bones were removed. Nobody would know why, but I would collapse. ~ Sarah Kane, Crave
> 
> Rugged and dark, winding among the springs of fire and poison, inaccessible to avarice or pride. ~ Alastor: or the Spirit of Solitude, Percy Bysshe Shelley  
> Empathy. Empathy run riot. Empathy with the victim, with the beaten. Are you sick yet? ~ The Ritual Slaughter of Gorge Mastromas, Dennis Kelly  
> Goodness, or cowardice? ~ The Ritual Slaughter of Gorge Mastromas, Dennis Kelly


End file.
